Adachi Interview Bourary 2

Messages in a Bottle:
An Interview with Filmmaker Masao Adachi
Introduction to the Interview
Harry Harootunian and Sabu Kohso
In June 2006, we interviewed the Japanese experimental filmmaker

Masao Adachi in Tokyo. The interview was arranged and organized by the
film critic Go Hirasawa. After creating a number of challenging films, in 1974
Adachi decided to go to Palestine to commit his energies to the cause of
the Palestinian Revolution for liberation, whereupon he was imprisoned in
Lebanon for activities that were revealed only later and extradited to Japan,
where he spent two additional years in prison. In 2007, Adachi brought out
his first feature film, Yuheisha – Terorisuto (The Prisoner), after his release.
Our interview also marked the celebration of this special occasion.
The importance of Adachi’s resurfacing at this time reminds us of
the moment of the 1960s in Japan and the mass mobilizations against
The following abbreviations are used throughout: PLO – Palestine Liberation Organi-
zation; PFLP – Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; PLF – Palestine Liberation
Front; DFLP – Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; PFLP-GC – Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command; ALF – Arab Liberation Front; JRA
– Japanese Red Army.
boundary 2 35:3 (2008) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-012 © 2008 by Duke University Press

64 boundary 2 / Fall 2008
the signing of the Mutual Security Treaty with the United States, signaling
for many Japan’s willing embrace of neocolonial status in the American
imperium. But it also signifies a truly global moment, initiated in Paris in
1968 and fueled by a militant third worldism prompted by the war in Vietnam.
In Japan, a vibrant avant-garde was already formed among artists, film-
makers, writers, dramatists, dancers that looked increasingly to the every-
day as the site for cultural production and political practice, as in fact the
place of their reunion. This new orientation was a departure from and direct
rejection of the world of liberal political intellectuals, who, since the end of
the war, had tried to promote a program based on rethinking the terms of
a proper and responsible political subjectivity for a new social democracy.
But this strategy, hobbled by a habitual distrust of a mass constituency
and substantive democracy, was eventually overtaken by the successful
restoration of prewar state power and bureaucratic personnel pledged to
the quest of economic supremacy at any cost. It was also defeated by the
fateful rescuing of the emperor and imperial house from war responsibility
and hanging, making possible the return of a model of social structure that
would dominate the reconfiguration of postwar Japanese society.
The virtual cultural revolution that exploded in Japan in the 1960s
was reinforced by widespread student militancy demanding greater
autonomy for universities and colleges in response to government efforts to
rein them in and even eliminate crucial campuses. This cultural transforma-
tion in Japan inflected a worldwide movement and momentarily promised
the prospect of a revolution, which ultimately never happened. And it was
in this context that we must understand both Adachi’s fervent involvement
in cultural productions that aimed to unite with political praxis and his later
decision to abandon Japan in the early 1970s to pursue this revolutionary
ideal in one of the few places of the third world where the vision of a cultural
and political transformation was still an active possibility.
In the Japan of the 1970s, as well as throughout the industrial world,
the rumblings of third worldism as the staging ground for world revolution
were receding and barely audible, and were steadily being drowned out by
the drumbeats of a different kind of transformation that was proclaiming
to remake the world into the image of a free, self-regulating market under
neoliberal political regimes called “globalization.” Adachi’s return to Japan
after a long absence of nearly a quarter of a century constitutes an event
of complex historical significance that has managed to alter the meaning of
one of the most enduring tropes in the modern Japanese rhetorical arse-
nal. Before World War II, writers, artists, and thinkers constantly called for a
Harootunian and Kohso / An Interview with Masao Adachi 65
“return to Japan,” which meant the return to some, as yet, unsullied cultural
spirit (and the difference of identity) that made Japan irreducibly Japanese
and would remain as the self-protective armor against encroachments of
the outside world and the contaminations of foreign artifacts, ideas, and
things. With Adachi’s physical return to Japan, we have not the recalling of
an exhausted, reified spiritual essence but rather one that fully embodies
the promise and fresh spiritual energy of an earlier generation and its time
and commitment to transforming the political and cultural landscape on a
global scale, ironically bringing Japan into that world which the prewar world
had tried to hold at arm’s length. It is this message, filtered through the fol-
lowing interview, and especially its hopefulness, that Adachi has brought
back with him, as he plunges back into the task of completing unfinished
business—now in a new historical register.
On Masao Adachi
Go Hirasawa
Translated by Philip Kaffen
Masao Adachi appeared in the new film movements happening in

Japan from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. The New Wave in Japan,
including Shochiku’s Nûberu bagu (nouvelle vague) with Nagisa Oshima
and Kijû Yoshida, as well as Toshio Matsumoto’s documentary group, is
widely known, but simultaneously, in a sphere completely removed from
the major film studios and production companies, three independent film
currents were born. These three currents are represented by the Student
Film Group, with the Nihon University Film Study Club (Nihon Daigaku Gei-
jutsu Gakubu Eiga Kenkyû-kai, sometimes shortened to Nichidai Eiken) as
its center, the Arts Film Group (Geijutsu Eiga), which took theories of the
avant-garde as its basis, and the group of individual filmmakers, who used
8mm home video cameras. The background to the emergence of these
new currents took place as the nation was concluding the 1960 U.S.-Japan
Security Treaty (Nichibei anzen hosho joyaku, also referred to as Anpo), the
gravest historical situation to emerge in Japan in the wake of the Second
World War. The student-centered New Left emerged within the resistance
to this treaty, breaking off from the Japan Communist Party, which had, up
to that time, been the focal point of the political avant-garde. One could
say that the 1968 Revolution in Japan was already anticipated in form by
1960. Within this turbulent period, politics, culture, and the arts all under-
went enormous transformations, with new theories and practices permeat-

ing the film world as well. Among these, the current of student films played
a major role in terms of both cinematic history and the history of activism,
and the leaders of this movement were Adachi and the group of people
with whom he worked. Even after the failure to prevent the passage of
the security treaty, Adachi and his associates continued to explore various
genres and modes of expression, from production methods to screening
forms, conducting all manner of experiments that transcended the existing
conceptualizations of cinema as such, and thoroughly pursuing the spirit of
independent cinema, or what would later be called underground film, and
its philosophies.
Subsequently, Adachi himself, through the VAN Film Science
Research Center, which had emerged as the successor to the Nihon Uni-
versity Film Study Club, joined up with Kôji Wakamatsu’s production group,
Wakamatsu Pro. The genre of “pink cinema” had emerged in 1963, and
Wakamatsu took advantage of the characteristics inherent in the genre,
including low budgets and quick production times—commonly considered
as shortcomings—in order to continue his guerilla-like experiments. Though
he began drawing attention as the star of antiestablishment cinema, it was
through the participation of Adachi that Wakamatsu Pro became trans-
formed into an even more radical activist organization. The films that
emerged from this group, including Wakamatsu’s Okasareta hakui (Vio-
lated Angels, 1967), Yuke yuke nidome no shojo (Go, Go Second Time
Virgin, 1969), Seizoku (Sex Jack, 1970), Tenshi no kôkotsu (Ecstasy of the
Angels, 1972), and Adachi’s works Seiyûgi (Sex Game, 1968) and Jogaku-
sei gerira (Female Student Guerillas, 1969), both anticipated and reflected
on the revolution of 1968 and at the same time, in their militant agitations,
drew the enthusiastic support of the Zenkyoto activists who were leading
the 1968 rebellion. At the same time, Adachi continued to produce his own
independent films and, after his collaboration with former Nihon Univer-
sity Film Study Club members on the film Gingakei (Galaxy, 1967), went
on to produce Ryakusho: renzoku shasatsuma (A.K.A. Serial Killer, 1969),
with the film critic and anarchist Masao Matsuda and scriptwriter Mamoru
Sasaki.
This work, which followed the landscapes that must have been wit-
nessed by Norio Nagayama, a nineteen-year-old man who drew much
attention at the time as a convicted serial killer, gave birth to the activist
theory of fûkeiron, a new key concept that replaced the then popular notion
of a situation (jôkyô), provoking considerable debates. The film took Naga-
yama, who had roamed throughout Japan from rural regions to cities as
a migrant worker during the period of high economic growth, and made
him into a medium through which state power could be witnessed. Para-
doxically, the landscapes that greeted him were relentlessly uniform, bear-
ing no signs of individualized senses of place or space, instead display-
ing a homogenized essence symbolizing the ubiquity of state power. This
theory thus nimbly equated state power with landscape and, from 1968,
in which massive battles and riots erupted between feuding powers in the
streets, launched a more guerilla-like and nomadic battle style that would
continue post-1968. This sensibility informed Oshima’s Tokyo sensô sengo
hi wa (The Man Who Left His Will on Film, 1970) and was further radi-
calized by the photography of Nakahira Takuma. Moreover, Adachi, along
with Wakamatsu, veered off to Beirut on the way back from the Cannes
Film Festival, where they completed Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai sensô sengen
(Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War, 1971), a new film in which
they shot the “everyday” of Arab guerillas as a text for world revolution.
Refusing the existing mode of film screening, and based on the declaration
that screening itself is a form of activist movement, Adachi formed the Red
Bus Screening Troupe (Aka basu jôeitai). Through this group, the work was
screened in Palestine and Europe, becoming a monumental achievement
for the notion of cinema as movement in Japan. Hôdôron (theory of report-
age) has been proposed as a means of elevating the theory of landscape
to a critique of the state, but the development of landscape theory, which
emerged as a means of signaling and resisting the homogenization of the
world, deserves reconsideration in the current moment when the system of
post-Fordism is complete.
The Red Army work provided the opportunity for Adachi to throw
himself into the Palestinian revolution, and he left Japan in 1974 to do so.
His whereabouts thereafter remained unknown for some time, but after a
quarter century in prison in Lebanon, he was extradited to Japan and impris-
oned again. However, after his release from prison, he completed his most
recent work, Yûheisha – Terorisuto (The Prisoner, 2006), which focuses
on the figure of Kôzô Okamoto, the lone surviving perpetrator of the Lod
Airport raid of 1972. Tracing the trajectory of Adachi and his films, including
this most recent work, his first in thirty-five years, poses questions about
the theory and practice of independent cinema at the current moment; in
his effort to grasp for new possibilities, his will to confront the difficult con-
ditions of the contemporary world, Adachi underscores the way these theo-
ries and practices must be synonymous with these greater struggles.
Cinema/Revolution: An Interview with

Harry Harootunian and Masao Adachi
Transcribed and translated by Philip Kaffen
HH: I want to thank you, Masao Adachi, for providing time and allowing me
to speak with you today about your work and the current situation. It was
very unfortunate, in fact, that we didn’t have that opportunity at NYU [New
York University]. As I remember in the statement you had prepared for us
when we first showed some of your films a few years ago, much of your
filmmaking has been deeply involved in the encounter with people. In many
ways, you were denied that opportunity in New York, as we were denied the
occasion of speaking directly with you. It is evident that since the beginning
of your career as a filmmaker, your films have consistently disclosed an
intimate encounter with people in the cinema movement.
I should say also at the outset that I’m probably the person least
qualified to speak about your work or about filmmaking. I am only a film-
watcher. I thought, for a number of reasons at the time your films were
screened in New York, that it was important for us and students to have at
least some encounter or contact with some of the films you made. At that
time, I was involved in administering a department at NYU that was a new
undertaking, devoted to the study of modern East Asian societies and cul-
tures. It occurred to me in discussion with a number of other people that the
opportunity to present your work would provide students as well as faculty
with some contact with a living, experimental cultural producer and one
whose films really addressed vital political questions.
. The title of the interview was inspired by the book of the same title, Eiga/kakumei [Film/
revolution] (Tokyo: Kawade shobô shinsha, 2003), the first published book of interviews
conducted upon Adachi’s extradition to Japan. Adachi discusses in detail everything from
his life growing up to his activities with the Nihon University Film Study Club and the VAN
Film Science Research Center, his joining of Wakamatsu Productions, his collaborations
with Nagisa Oshima, the founding of the second edition of the film journal Eiga hihyô,
the production of A.K.A. Serial Killer and The Red Army/PFLP, screening movements,
his move to Palestine, his work with the Japanese Red Army, all the way up to his extra-
dition. Subsequently, he also published the collected notes of his three years in prison in
Lebanon as Hei no naka no senya ichiya: Arabu gokuchûki [One thousand and one nights
behind walls: Arab prison notes] (Tokyo: Aiikusha, 2005). There is also a single volume of
collected writings, Eiga e no senryaku [Strategies for cinema] (Tokyo: Shobunsha, 1974).
Additionally, two special editions of journals were published, one in 2000 by Production
Eigei, Adachi Eiga geijutsu rinji zôkan: Adachi Masao Reinen; and another in 2004 by
Jôkyô shuppan, Jôkyô bessatsu: On Adachi Masao Eiga/Kakumei.
As you know, we showed two films—A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969) and

The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971)—and the subsequent
discussions were carried out on them in a political context in the United
States that was increasingly insensitive to the needs and requirements of
the Palestinian cause. At that time, especially in New York after 9/11, there
was really a growing hostility toward the Middle East, and especially the
Palestinian cause and its aspirations. This was dramatized often brilliantly
and polemically with the struggle of Edward Said and, in his last days, his
intellectual defense of the Palestinian people’s desire of a homeland.
Your films converge with a longstanding interest I’ve had, especially
with reference to Japan and parts of Asia, in the question of how art or cul-
ture has intersected with politics. This is especially true in Japan’s modern
history, and it has been one of the principal thematic considerations in my
own work. I realize that your principal concerns certainly are different from
mine and have been occupied in the making of film. With this in view, I was
particularly interested in how the form of film itself, especially as it utilizes
certain kinds of techniques associated with the documentary, might be the
basis for a rethinking of ways to reunify politics and culture.
So I’ll start with a general question, which was already supplied by
the last point you made in your video address you had sent to us at the
time of your showing, where you say that “my principle is to see politics
and media as one and the same thing. I have never separated them in my
thinking, and I think it is time to make art again as our own thing without
worrying about institutional judgments.” While I agree with the sentiment,
it raises the question of why and how does film allow you to engage with a
specific social situation as a condition of actually acting upon it?
MA: This is really an enormous question, so the answer may come in a

roundabout way. As a person who makes films, I believe that film is basi-
cally a product of my own imagination. Those people who watch films also
try to see them through their imagination. For cinema, this mutual relation
of imagination is everything. I make films following my imagination, and this
process itself becomes my thinking or message.
Additionally, when I express my thinking through cinema, there are
two possible methods. One of those methods is to try to tell my own private
story as honestly as possible. Another method is to project everything that
is built up from my imagination. That is to say, to project the memory of
reality, the things that we conceive but aren’t necessarily real, to put forth
an image of unreality, or what we might call a way of observing the relation-
ship between the antirealistic or antipersonal things of the world and our
own reality.
I think it is the task of filmmaking to produce work without catego-
rizing or distinguishing based on these two methods or directions. We nor-
mally refer to the first method as that of documentary and the second we
call feature film, and make various categorizations based on these and
other methods. Yet, on my part, I want to make films, whether documen-
taries, dramas, or any other kind of film, by focusing on that relationship
between the two methodologies. For example, those things that are part of
Japan and those which are not, those things that are part of cinema and
those which are not, like paintings or novels. I work from a basis of wanting
to demolish these categories.
From this basic stance, along with the thought that what we call the
political is society itself, it is the form of history itself; in addition, I also feel
that film and revolution, or film and arts, or politics and arts, are inseparable.
Moreover, in recognizing that, at the same time, I would like to present
their inseparability. There are times, depending on the subject matter, when
it takes the form of a perfectly normal film [laughter], but the decision is
based on the situation in which I find myself. To put it very schematically,
the thematic content is the critical relation that happens in between so-
called politics and art, without resorting to a theory of cinema.
However, as I said previously, I feel that the problem of imagination
is at the heart of everything, so a mere critical relation is finally insufficient.
Therefore, while I will continue to think about these and other questions
as Professor Harootunian poses them, I would like to explain the basic
position and circumstances around making the films A.K.A. Serial Killer
and The Red Army/PFLP. With regard to the political conditions at that
time, domestically the nation was in the midst of reinforcing the U.S.-Japan
Security Treaty that had been in place for ten years [since the 1960s] and
. Anpo is the abbreviation for the postwar peace treaty signed between the United States
and Japan, Anzen Hoshô Jôyaku (full title: Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security
between the United States and Japan [Nippon-koku to Amerika-gasshûkoku to no Aida
no Sôgo Kyôryoku oyobi Anzen Hoshô Jôyaku]). Following on from the initial peace treaty
signed in San Francisco in 1951, Anpo was renewed first in 1960 and then in 1970, on
both occasions meeting fierce resistance both within the Diet and also out in the streets,
where it spurred enormous radical revolts. The treaty essentially made Japan a client in
the cold war policies of the United States (who would provide military bases and protec-
tion at the expense of the Japanese government, which was otherwise forbidden from
military funding) and was passed by Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) politicians, including
with it the new political relationship between the United States and Japan.
At the same time, it was a period in which the oppressive sociopolitical
tendencies to further solidify Japan’s political and economic system began
anew. That is only the political aspect, but in fact, Japan possessed a very
rudimentary social structure, and when there is some political trend or cul-
tural current, everything else gets pulled into that [prevailing] trend in one
fell swoop. That was the character of Japanese society.
In addition to the domestic situation, within the international sphere,
there was first the Korean War, and then after that the Vietnam War, which
was a continuing current in the social conditions in which we lived. It
was within this situation that various cultural and artistic experiments and
models exploded with great vibrancy onto the scene. However the vast
majority of these experiments were those in which exploiting technological
qualities made possible through the development of industrial economics
took precedence and had absolutely no direct correlation at the level of
content with the contemporary conditions or social trends.
Within the field of film, for example, 8mm film cameras began to
spread to the point where anyone could make a private film and conduct
all kinds of experiments. It was a time in which the spread of scientific
technology on a mass level also began in the fields of art and music, and
the flourishing of various experiments using new concepts and methods
that broke with classical models. Within such trends, I always held to the
thought of seeking a better way at the level of method to tie together these
new possibilities with opportunities that were less trained on technology.
Around the time of the making of A.K.A. Serial Killer and The Red
Army/PFLP, I was also involved with various other films, but the question of
how to face the new political and social oppression was always among my
biggest concerns. A suffocating sense of enclosure stemming from politi-
cal oppressiveness underlay these feelings, and this took on an extremely
sharp form. The theme of A.K.A. Serial Killer, about the serial killer Norio
Nagayama, comes from this, and I was thinking about how to express
that feeling of enclosure itself, the problem of how to break that feeling, in
Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, who had been involved in the administration of Japanese
colonialism in Manchuria and was imprisoned as a Class A War Criminal. In some ways,
the treaty demonstrated just how corrupt and hollow calls for “democracy” sounded at the
time even among the general population.
. Japan’s postwar economic growth was largely augmented by the Korean and Vietnam
Wars, whereby the country became a supplier to the American military effort.
various film experiments. For that reason, my own interest was also torn
between reality and the negation of that reality. As a result, I myself feel
conditions under which I was changing are well reflected in the different
methods employed by A.K.A. Serial Killer and The Red Army/PFLP.
HH: You felt torn between that sense of enclosure on the one hand and the
political situation?
MA: Yes. Consequently, my interest in art and politics, or what we might call
the relationship between culture or media and politics, my interest in that
relation itself, was escalating.
HH: So all the films you were particularly concerned with or making were
in some way or another mediated by this concern for the divergence you
perceived occurring in Japanese society at that time?
MA: That’s right. In the films I completed in my earliest student years, I

made films explicitly with the theme of politics or [dealing with] the politi-
cal environment. However, I did not attempt to express those themes in
a political manner. As I said at the beginning, even there, imagination is
everything, so I believed it was more important to think about how to work
with metaphor.
HH: In other words, you are saying that you were responsive to the spe-
cific political situation at that moment, but in the films that you made at
that moment, their content does not really deal with the situations explic-
itly. If that’s the case, perhaps it’s the form of those particular films that
really speaks to that contemporary situation or alerts us to the force of an
immediate political environment.
MA: That is definitely one characteristic. Theoretically, I moved toward the

“theory of landscape” (fûkeiron), and from theory of landscape to news-
reel films, and finally reached a point where I was trying to make my own
low-budget diary-like films. At the same time, there also appeared another
project that envisaged screenings as a movement (jôei undô) . . .
HH: Some of us called attention to a similarity between French Situationists

and the theorization of fûkeiron, inasmuch as they were both simultaneous
and contemporary with each other [inflecting the same conjuncture], and
often shared similar views on how to configure fields of action. Can you
speak about how fûkeiron was formed among groups of people with whom
you were actually working or connected at the time?
MA: The making of A.K.A. Serial Killer progressed as we tried to develop

a script for the film, traveling around to each area of Japan that Nagayama
had lived in while he was drifting about the country. As we did this, there
were continuous debates, centered around staff members Masao Matsuda
[film critic] and Mamoru Sasaki [scriptwriter], over how to grasp the theme
of the movie, in other words, the world view of the protagonist, Nagayama,
and then how to put that into visual language. At the same time, I was think-
ing, from the perspective of film style, about whether we should shoot it as
a documentary or incorporate dramatic elements.
When we stood within the landscape that greeted Nagayama’s
everyday life, there was something that we could feel was common to every
landscape in every town we visited. This was just at the time in Japan when,
politically, there began to be all kinds of clamor about casting off the post-
war, and, economically, the flames of Japan’s policies for high economic
growth were reaching a peak. In every region that we came across, the old
towns where citizens had made their daily lives were crushed, incongruous
groups of tidy buildings sprouted and shot off into the horizon, the rustic
lanes of old villages were replaced with concrete and turned into highways,
and even in the landscape of preharvest fields there hovered a suffocating
air of efficiency and mass production. When we felt this, we were convinced
that Nagayama, however far he drifted, must have been seized by this same
suffocating sense of continual oppression. In other words, every place you
went in Japan was turning into small urban zones modeled on Tokyo, and
even the historic scenery of famous places was transformed into commer-
cialized tourist spots through catchphrases used in television campaigns,
like “Discover Japan.” This situation itself, though not in some solidified
form, involved the overflowing will of the government and the power of the
time. Certainly it was not only Nagayama—rather, the oppression incorpo-
rated all the people who lived in these transformed places. So we were con-
vinced that Nagayama, with gun in hand, kept firing at this landscape itself,
and that this is how he became embroiled in the serial killing incident. The
theme of the movie A.K.A. Serial Killer was decided—we resolved to depict
the figure of arbitrary power that appeared in the landscape, comparing it
with the alienated and threatened sense of existence experienced by Naga-
yama himself. This was the beginning of the fûkeiron debates, wherein the
subjectivity of each individual was simply swallowed up by the “reality of
landscape being expropriated by power,” and we made the besieged spirit
of Nagayama the protagonist. Thus some elevated dramatic factor, as well
as even the so-called documentary method, was unnecessary, or, rather,
would be damaging to fûkeiron. We created the film by focusing on the con-

tinuation of landscape alone.
These fûkeiron debates that began during the production of A.K.A.
Serial Killer soon drew the reactions of friends who were photographers
and painters; the debates continued to expand, and all manner of experi-
mental art works from a wide variety of fields was born. However, at that
time, we had no direct exchange with theoretical trends or film movements
abroad, and so I had no idea that similar efforts were being made in other
countries. Instead, we had put out the monthly journal Eiga hihyô [film criti-
cism], and the debates, centered on the efforts of creating a new film move-
ment, were advanced there; we could say that the so-called fûkeiron was
molded by Masao Matsuda’s theorization of this situation. Ultimately, fûkei-
ron was born from and flowed out of the conditions in Japan at that time.
Later, I came to learn of the existence of a confluence of movements and
theoretical exchanges in the West through the work of people like Jean-
Luc Godard, and I had a strong sense that, “Wow, truly a simultaneous
and global movement could happen.” Then I began to look not only to the
making of film but also to the importance of screenings as a movement
(jôei undô). It was at that point that I became a guerilla [laughter].
HH: But being a guerilla in this instance means leaving the world of the
imagination for acting on it, doesn’t it?
MA: Yes, but at the same time I would say I am very much a romanticist. As
a very basic standpoint, I went on to make another new film and started my
life in the guerilla society with a guerilla lifestyle. So, for me, to be a cineaste
and to be a guerilla are almost interchangeable, although people say they
are confused; on the one hand a cineaste, and on the other hand a gue-
rilla—but no, through my body they are one and the same thing.
HH: So, in other words, becoming a guerilla is also sustaining the

imagination?
MA: Yes. For instance, even within my lifestyle as a guerilla, in the begin-
ning, I was living far too casually, and I was often scolded, “Mister, what
. A reference to Akabasu jôeitai (Red Bus Screening Troupe), the screening group for
The Red Army/PFLP (1971) inaugurated on September 30, 1971, with its first screening in
Tokyo, and that crossed the country in a bright red microbus. Actively rejecting the notion
of a “work” associated with the capitalist film production industry, and searching for a
screening methodology that would be different from the existing system, they developed
a notion of screening itself as its own movement.
the hell do you think a revolution is?” After being there [in Palestine and
Lebanon] for twenty-six years, although some Japanese guerillas had come
as volunteers and learned to read and write Arabic, I alone was unable to
do so. Those days were too full as it was.
HH: Right, I kept thinking of that work by Jean Genet, where he goes to
Palestine. But I’m not sure whether he ever learned Arabic, either.
MA: Once, I saw him in a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. I tried to talk
with him, but he never spoke with anybody—Palestinian or non-Palestinian.
Many artists and writers came to see him in the hotel, but there were no
conversations with him. He was just drinking wine quietly. He said he was
very ready to come here and so studied many important things; and he
wrote, as a message to all journalists and artists, “I have no chance to
talk with all of you” [laughter]. A Japanese critic, Inuhiko Yomota, who had
visited Palestine later, was also surprised when I recounted the episode.
In Tunisia, he had tried to see Genet to ask him about his stay as an immi-
grant. Thinking about it now, Genet could never ultimately recognize him-
self in the place where he actually existed [even when he was sitting in a
refugee camp], and I think this may have been an internal problem for him.
Yet I wonder if even a single person noticed the deep and overflowing sym-
pathy he held for the Palestinian people that existed within that silence. In
later years, he wrote about the silence he maintained at the time. I read his
posthumously published reflections, Un Captif amoureux, and it was really
wonderful.
Just to bring the conversation back, of course, I ordinarily did film
work with people like Kôji Wakamatsu and Nagisa Oshima. That in
. Film director Kôji Wakamatsu was born in 1936. After debuting as a pink film director,
in 1965 he established his own production company, hiring various young film people
and, taking advantage of the constraints imposed by low-budget genre film, putting out
extreme works with a guerilla-like approach. His works include Taiji ga mitsuryô suru toki
(The Embryo Hunts in Secret, 1966), Okasareta hakui (Violated Women in White, 1967),
Tenshi no kôkotsu (Ecstacy of the Angels, 1972), and Mizu no nai puuru (A Pool without
Water, 1982).
. Film director Nagisa Oshima was born in 1932. Occupying the central position in the
Shochiku Nûberu bagu, Japan’s version of the New Wave, Oshima established his own
production company, Sôzôsha (later Oshima Nagisa Productions), in 1961. As the flag
bearer of independent film movements, he put out experimental works in collaboration
with young filmmakers and cultural producers in a variety of genres. Representative
works include Nihon no yoru to kiri (Night and Fog in Japan, 1960), Kôshikei (Death by
Hanging, 1968), Shinjuku dorobô nikki (Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, 1968), and Ai no koriida
(The Realm of the Senses, 1976).
itself was exciting, but somehow I felt my involvement was kind of limited.
Wakamatsu could understand my feelings in that regard, but Oshima was
extremely critical.
HH: Why so?
MA: He was of the opinion that if you don’t bring everything into the film, all
your anxieties and thoughts, then you are not a director. I think Oshima is
a very fine documentarist, and sometimes his narrative cinema is also of
a very high level, politically and humanistically. But, at the same time, he
wanted to put everything within a frame. I said no: the frame will be there,
but, at the same time, the audience should decide. It is fine for the film-
maker to put all his feelings into the work, but he should make films where
the audience can watch it more freely as well.
HH: I like that particular metaphor, because the framing represents the
control of the author or director. So, the framing actually puts the director at
a distance from the audience. You want to close the distance so that what
you are saying goes back to your earlier view and desire to leave it open for
the audience to determine their own framing.
MA: I think that each audience member should make his or her own frames,
insofar as that is how directors can begin to close the distance between
themselves and their audiences.
HH: When you were speaking this way, I kept thinking of Brecht, who always
leaves his plays open for some kind of audience participation.
MA: I have been influenced by people like Brecht and Beckett.
HH: They did it with plays, and you’re doing it with film, where it becomes a
much more complex problem, or certainly a different one, perhaps.
MA: A more complicated explanation is possible, and at the same time,

there should be a more active stage of experimentation between director
and audience in the cinema. At that time [the 1970s], there were various
happenings and performances.
HH: I understand that, but what makes it more complex from my layman’s
view is that a film is presented as a completed production, but you are pro-
posing that as only the beginning, that a film can then continue to interact
with different audiences, and they will contribute to its completion on their
own.
MA: That’s right. I also screen for people films that have frames. Through
screening, by meeting with an audience, this process enables me to objec-
tify myself, or to be able to see myself in the films. This relation, “a certain
kind of relation,” as I said earlier, brings about a repetition and continuity.
HH: More importantly, you came upon some idea of interaction long before
the age of so-called computer interactivity.
MA: Methodologically speaking, I was an experimental filmmaker, experi-

menting, in various ways, with different methods of screening at that time.
In those film screening experiments, from the late 1960s to the early 1970s,
there were various cinema-related people who were participating along
with us, but there were also even more artists from other fields who were
simply willing to work with the materials and in the field of cinema.
As I said before, a trend toward depoliticization emerged, and this
was unbearable to me. There were various experiments happening in vari-
ous artistic fields, but the majority of these were depoliticized.
HH: I think that the historical moment is very important still, because a
lot of visual art today is very conservative. That needs further historical
scrutiny.
MA: Yes, and it was at that point that art became a form of media. At that
time, the films made in Japan or globally grew to be polarized within an
extremely narrow sense: whether to become political or to move toward
depoliticization. Within these conditions, the people who were relatively
good were Wakamatsu and Oshima.
And in the same sense, I was very interested in Shinsuke Ogawa in
Japan, who documented the Sanrizuka farmers’ struggle for decades, and
Godard in France. But they themselves were also affected by this split.
. Film director Shinsuke Ogawa was born in 1935. After working at Iwanami Films, in
1968 he established an independent production company. Continuing after his record of
the Sanrizuka Airport struggles and the Zenkyoto radical leftist movements, he lived in
an isolated village in Tohoku and worked to open the Yamagata Documentary Film Fes-
tival. He died in 1992. His key works include Assatsu no mori (The Oppressed Students:
Forest of Pressure, 1967), Nihon kaihô sensen: Sanrizuka no natsu (The Battle Front for
the Liberation of Japan: A Summer in Sanrizuka, 1967), Nippon koku: furuyashiki mura
(A Japanese Village: Furuyashikimura, 1982), among others.
. This was a movement among farmers, beginning in the mid-1960s at Sanrizuka, to
defend land that the Japanese government tried to expropriate through force for the con-
struction of Narita Airport, just outside of Tokyo. Because plans to construct an airport on
farmland were made in secret and without consulting the farmers of that land, much criti-
Since you are a scholar, I would like to turn the tables and ask you a
question. For those people who haven’t given up and keep working, how do
you sustain yourself?
HH: That’s a difficult question. I think the split is a sign of a revolution that
never happened. What occurs is that you get a divergence where a lot of
these art producers, filmmakers, or artists use experimentation and put it to
the service of art and art alone. What this really represents is a drift away
from politics to culture. And as to what happens to those who remain true
to some kind of political mission or vocation, I think that is a more complex
problem, but a lot of them disappear, in the United States, at least. Some of
them drifted to the universities [laughter].
MA: Like you [laughter]?
HH: Would you speak about Palestinian life as you were able to observe
it in Lebanon, Tunis, and Palestine? Would you also give us some ideas
about how Palestinians actually viewed their enemies? Moreover, it would
be of great interest to readers to hear you address the complicated relation-
ships of factions in the PLO [Fatah, PFLP, PLF] and the less organized radi-
cal groups, and describe how you were able to negotiate your way through
them.
MA: The Palestinian people I had joined up with in 1974 were those living
in refugee camps. There are said to be over three million of them, coming
from Arab countries as well as several other countries. At that point, I was
planning to produce a continuation of The Red Army/PFLP, the piece I had
made three years prior. In Lebanon at that time, Palestinians in the moun-
tainous areas away from the cities, for example in Sabra Shatila in Beirut,
in Sayda’s [Sidon] Ein el-Hilweh, in Sur, and Tripoli [Tarabulus], had built
and were living in areas packed so tightly that they were practically on top
of each other. The massacre and exile of “Black September” in Jordan in
1969 and 1970 forced a doubling of the refugee population on a massive
cism and enmity was aroused nationwide. Various activist groups also joined the struggle
on the side of the farmers, and the site became one of the central points for social move-
ments in postwar Japan. Riot police were brought in, as farmers constructed elaborate
tunnels and trenches to wage a long-term struggle. Ogawa made a series of films in the
1960s and 1970s documenting the conflict that have become among the most important
postwar representations of documentary and radical filmmaking practice in Japan. Even
though the airport was finally built in 1978, it remains incomplete and mired in controversy
as the struggle continues decades later.
scale in Lebanon. Lebanon from the start had a state-structure based upon
a divided domination among different religious sects, where the average
citizen could accept living together harmoniously with fellow Arabs, but the
government and the state institutions, in the new climate, became cautious
about the enormous population of Palestinian refugees, and especially out-
side of the border zone with Israel, began to apply severe rules according
to status. Thereby the Palestinian people were forced en masse into poor
refugee camps.
I believe I don’t need to get into the details of the history of the Pal-
estinian people during the 1970s and 1980s. But the major part of my com-
munal life with them involved trying to survive in the refugee camps as we
were showered with bombs during the state of civil war. While continuing a
war on two fronts, against Israel and Lebanese right-wing militant groups,
I continued to see the steady restoration in the refugee camps from the
damage wrought by Israel’s campaign of annihilation. With the withdrawal
of the PLO from Beirut in 1982, a tremendous social change was brought to
the Palestinian people as all the men—both young and old—disappeared
from the refugee camps. In the women- and children-centered society cre-
ated by the breakup of the families and the absence of men, an intense
and wretched battle for survival was waged by the fierce power of those
women.
At that time, Arabs and Palestinians were united in a moving belief in
family and national consciousness, enabling them to rebuild from scratch,
repeatedly, the decimated family and social structures, even as human
life and existence itself was threatened and lost. To me, the figure of their
tenacity remains burned into my eyes as a true model for life force even
today. There still remains a connection between neighbors and what we
could call the power of family ties, which is lost in today’s Japan, some-
thing that united with the consciousness of the wish to restore the home-
land. In this kind of situation, the problem that cannot be solved by the
people operating only within the refugee camps has become the education
of a new generation. Free education from kindergarten through junior high
school is largely guaranteed by UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works
Agency], and within the system, where each organization or movement
provides basic military training for the youth who are over thirteen, a solid
national education has also been achieved. However, when going from high
school to college, the high fees that cannot be paid become a big problem,
and with discrimination against refugees, job opportunities are narrow; the
majority wind up continuing military training and then become guerillas,
or setting out to earn a living by relying on connections of acquaintances

from other Arab nations. Of course, the PLO’s effort was poured into higher
education, and each year, over two hundred young men and women were
sent abroad to study. But it was mostly the socialist countries who provided
the funding free of charge. The Arab countries, well aware of this situation,
employed an exclusionary and discriminatory policy, in which they made
the finest graduates of the medical departments of socialist countries take
the national test in their own countries again in English, and if they did
not pass it, they would not be granted a medical license. Nonetheless, the
work of Palestinians—not only doctors but also teachers, people in politi-
cal administration, and other white-collar professions—up until the first
Gulf War, was so successful that it could have convinced anyone that the
potential to rebuild the Palestinian state was gaining little by little. Following
the withdrawal of the PLO from Tunis in 1982, those experiences within
Lebanon were used to plant suspicion toward the PLO in Arab countries;
at the same time, the refugee camps in each area were isolated as Pales-
tinian concessions. Within that reality, Arafat’s administration in the PLO
had no option but to open up a game of compromise with Israel through the
Oslo Accords in 1993.
My relations with various Palestinian organizations began with the
collaborative production with the PFLP on The Red Army/PFLP, and my
actual collaborations with them extended over a broad range of activities.
In particular, I tried to learn about the struggles within the PLO over the
policy of constructing a Palestinian state as well as the experiences of divi-
sions within the organization and general accounts of the movements, but
it proved quite challenging. The reason I tried to work civilly with the main-
stream faction Fatah; the DFLP; the PFLP-GC; the ALF, which had broken
from the PFLP; the PLF, which had broken off from the PFLP-GC; and other
groups was partly because of learning about the contemporary state of the
Palestinian revolution. But more fundamentally, it was because of learning
about the overall situation of the factional struggles and coalitions within
the PLO, which had become the representative group of the Palestinian
people as the united front in the armed struggle.
Here I will sketch a rough and biased account of the various Pales-
tinian organizations. The ground of the factional struggles of PLO-related
. Here, Adachi suggests that the PLO taught him about the importance of a united effort,
as it is evident he is specifically referring to the problems of division within the Japanese
New Left movements.
organizations, the split within Fatah or the split between the DFLP and
the PFLP, who followed the path of Marx/Leninism, was one based on a
difference of opinion over how best to deal with the liberation of Palestine
and the path of nation building. One of the bases that can’t really be called
a basis, in an extremely everyday expression, is the overemphasis of self-
assertion of all the people in leadership positions saying, “I’ll do it,” or “We’ll
do it my way,” and refusing any points of compromise with others. That each
of the groups was supposedly on the same path and joined in the same
armed struggle and yet unable to reach agreement with other groups was
due to the strong manifestation of each of these people’s self-assertion.
However, a more serious basis was the question of which group of refugees
the organization would be based on, as these greatly reflected the condi-
tions of home-regions of each organization’s members. For example, the
mainstream Fatah faction, whose constituents stretch across the entirety
of occupied lands, instigated no major internal antagonism even with the
supposedly compromised path of the mini-nation state plan. However, the
antimainstream Revolutionary Council faction of Fatah shares a common
point with the PFLP, PFLP-GC, and other antimainstream factions, which is
that by the terms of the Middle East Peace negotiations, the overwhelming
majority of their members were considered to be not within the occupied
territories but rather within “Israeli land” as determined by the 1948 line.
None of them was ever eligible to return to their homelands according to the
mini-nation plan. This difference is not everything, but it is the basis for the
decision of whether to take the path of the liberation of all lands en masse
or whether to start from the path of partial liberation and the building of a
mini state. This point also had sizable repercussions since the possibility
remained that mass numbers of refugees would become displaced persons
who could never return to Palestine because of where they were born.
However, after the Oslo Accords in 1993, the problem within the
PLO of constructing a nation was hemmed in by the degree to which there
should be compromise with Israel. The antimainstream faction’s demand
for “the complete retaking of all occupied territories” was drowned out by
the U.S.-fabricated mood of an international “Middle East Peace” and com-
pletely lost. On the other hand, in the refugee camps in each Arab land,
the state of crisis in which the actual displaced people lived was reaching
higher and higher levels. Due to their continually being locked into the situa-
tion of the “Middle East Peace” plan, which would not return any homeland
even within Palestine, the PLO leadership, as well as some organizations
within it, incurred the disillusion of many, which occasioned a definite sense
of estrangement amongst public opinion. The eruption of this mistrust led

to some beginning to seek a new axis of organization elsewhere, and even
within my own experience of communal life in refugee camps, there was
a certain sense of historical inevitability to the emergence of groups like
Hamas and Hezbollah [the party of God]. In the self-government zones of
the Palestinians, several organizations outside of Fatah continued to be
fodder for Israel’s extermination campaign, and the fact that not enough
of a mass movement could be created invited a lag in the reform of the
general body of the PLO and each organization. That they could not keep
up systematically with the flow of public opinion or the conditions there
appears to have accelerated this trend.
On the occasion of creating the Japanese Red Army in 1976, I was
establishing collaborative relations with several Palestinian organizations
outside the PFLP; additionally, there were collaborations and meetings
between people involved in liberation struggles from several Middle East-
ern, Asian, and African nations. In the way of life of the Kurds, Armenians,
Iranians, and other organizations aiming for the liberation of their native
lands, a mountain of suggestive learning points not only to the contem-
porary conditions of the struggle for national liberation, but enough even
to force Japanese activists to reassess their own historical consciousness
and grasp of contemporary conditions. This was also very fruitful for my
own way of living in refugee camps.
HH: In this connection, readers would also be interested in learning about

what you were doing in the camps, how, in fact, you were making your way,
and the specific kinds of work you were performing in these years of exile.
MA: I can break up my activities into a few major periods. In the early stage,
at the beginning, I was working on a sequel to The Red Army/PFLP and,
while there, deepened my relations with Japanese activists who were work-
ing as international volunteers at each place I went; that exchange devel-
oped into the creation of the organization Nihon Sekigun [Japanese Red
Army], and during that time, we started to actually strengthen the orga-
nization. However, at the same time, while I was doing these activities, a
campaign in Japan was started, in which I was called “the spokesman for
the Japanese Red Army,” and so began the second period of my activities,
in which I was compelled by necessity to adopt an underground lifestyle.
At that time, Palestinians in Lebanon were right in the middle of civil war,
so how to survive and continue activities under the conditions of civil war
had become a big task. In collaborating with the cultural activities of the
Palestinian organization, I ultimately started to live in military camps as a

guerilla of the Japanese Red Army, and then we started doing activities to
open up cooperative relations between different organizations. In the third
period, from 1982 until I was arrested in 1997, we collaborated with sub-
jects in the struggle for liberation and organizations in countries en route to
revolution. But as a principle of the Japanese Red Army, we made it a point
to keep our distance from any organizations that held any position in state
power. At the same time that we were continuing to collaborate with the
stateless Palestinians, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, accompanied by full-
scale globalization, called for a violent tempest which rained down on small
group organizations like ours, and so we began to reorganize the Japa-
nese Red Army itself. We were labeled as a “terrorist organization” by the
United States, and international activities became something like a league
in which all the poor and small organizations throughout the world rubbed
shoulders in a kind of nagaya [tenement house], overwhelmed by taking
on the collaboration of each organization’s survival and dealing with fur-
ther underground organizing. Nonetheless, this gave birth to a great sense
of camaraderie among those fellow activists who shared the difficulties of
living within these struggles and also brought me the joy of living in reality
according to the internationalism which privileged helping out those who
are suffering the most.
In each of these three periods, in the field of culture I participated in
such activities as organizing the Palestinian Writers Conference, making my
own preparations for feature filmmaking, and starting up again documen-
tary filmmaking. But with the 1982 attack by Israel, and then the air raids on
Bekaa Valley, all the materials for filming and the archives were lost. So, I
continued in the experience of searching out film activities, always “starting
over again from zero,” just as the Palestinians did with the figure of the lost
fortress they had finally erected.
HH: This is a personal question, but it also comes out of my own political
interest. I thought about it when I watched The Red Army/PFLP. I thought
that in many ways this is not as much about art as about politics and
strategy, and what caught my attention was the attempt to fuse a politi-
cally radical coalition devoted to some conception of world revolution with a
national liberation movement.
I realize that these various groups that came to Palestine—the Japa-
nese Red Army [Sekigun], the Irish revolutionary groups—represented a
mix that was really quite different from the majority of Palestinian freedom
fighters, not necessarily Marxists who weren’t Palestinians, like George

Habash and people like that, but the PLO, for example. Was this ever an
issue that you considered or thought about while you were there? In the
end, Edward Said was, first and last, a nationalist.
MA: I don’t agree with that. In my opinion, if I can sum it up, in the case of
Edward Said, he was very radical in turning away from being a cosmopoli-
tan to a nationalist. However, he was finally unable to become a nationalist,
and he died right before making the transformation.
I had many debates with political activists and artists there. They
were nationalists, but their enemies were not at the level of ethnicity, so
they were pulled to the border of nationalism and internationalism, a bor-
der they transcended to establish their own position. Meanwhile, I was at a
point where I was thinking how it would be possible to revolutionize Japan.
In order for me to join the struggle with them, it was necessary to straddle
two stages [the national and the international level]. At the same time, in the
thought of most Japanese revolutionaries, in spite of their strong nationalist
tendencies, they called themselves internationalists. For example, the Red
Army Faction debated the strategy of world war rather than just making
declarations, and they called for things such as the establishment of a
global Red Army. But these were merely suggestions, while the real prob-
lem they were facing at that time was how to develop the student move-
ment into a national movement. At that time, such a movement had not yet
been realized, and I went to Palestine, where there was active cooperation
with the national movement at an international level. This was because the
enemy was at an international level. So this was a completely new situation
for me.
So I decided to follow the Palestinian national revolution and, through
that study, to make a new cinema, and I continued to do so. This is what
I have done for twenty-five years! At the same time, Edward Said himself
became a leader of the nationalist movement, or one of the important activ-
ists within the PLO, by trying to revolutionize the PLO as a nationalist move-
ment. But, in the case of Arab nationalist movements, there is no need to
say, for instance, that it’s an international communist movement, because
the nationalist movement among Arabs itself is already internationalist. As
you know, he became very radical inside the national leadership of the
PLO. But, the two-step policy of strategy toward the goal of national inter-
est was going on, and he could not agree with it, so he took a more radical
position within the PLO. Finally, after some political struggles, he suddenly
gave up his position within the leadership because the nationalist strategy
and rightist political line could not cooperate with him, and he started to
criticize these policies as part of the conservative bureaucrat line.
HH: Your insight into the nationalist movement, which points to the waging
of a struggle at a broader international level, is a really interesting idea. I
guess I would have seen it in a different way, but it comes to the same thing:
this is basically an anticolonial level. But with Said, one of the things that
struck me about his thinking was a conception of politics, which was always
about the Palestinian struggle, juxtaposed to, and really at odds with, a
view of culture rooted in high European bourgeois culture.
MA: Yes, he criticizes “Orientalism,” imperialism, and conservative national-

ist movements. But, at the same time, he could never be dependent on the
real national Palestinian movement itself. This is one of his weak points.
In my case, at that time in Japan, the tendency of revolution was
almost dead. But in Said’s case, the reality of the Palestinian national
movement was going on. As an artist, poet, and musician, all his senses
should come together in his body and thought, but all the time he was try-
ing to achieve a balance with his politics. As a political critic he was strong.
The idea of his work was very radical. But, I feel, when he was involved with
music, he became very weak.
HH: And that is where he diverges from you, Mr. Adachi. Your interest in cul-
ture derives from your encounters with various groups and various people.
And their everyday life is very crucial, but for the completion of whatever
film you make. His—Said’s—was always separated from that grounding
in the everyday, until the very last, and then he began to worry about land
settlements in Palestine. But by then he had little time left.
MA: After I went over [completely] to the Palestinian side, as an interna-

tional volunteer I tried to mobilize artistic work, especially in the cinema
field, but there was so much cultural conservatism within the movement.
For example, they never accepted The Red Army/PFLP, and they wanted
more classical propaganda films. I was fighting and fighting—OK, we don’t
need a propagandist to be a cinema director. Some ordinary man or woman
should create the propaganda, I thought, and I tried to support them. At the
same time, the cinema department of the PLO started a campaign, so I
tried to cooperate with them, but in this one dimension.
For example, I had a screening of The Red Army/PFLP in a refugee
camp, but when they saw it, they just searched for their dead relatives who
appeared in the film, and they would cry, touching the screen because they
were missing the dead. The Red Army/PFLP is about how to be based in a
mass movement, but in Palestine already the armed struggle was operating
as a mass movement. So it was not necessary for them to see this film.
This is one point. Another point is that they had very conservative ideas
about what they wanted to see in art at that time. More recently, there are
nice experimental new models, but at that time they were mostly conserva-
tive. After my collaboration, some directors could get gold prizes in Moscow
for their achievement in making classical propagandist cinema.
HH: One of the things you touched on earlier, and I wondered if you could
give more detail about, is your utilization of conceptual tools such as fûkei-
ron, newsreel, and ultimately, propaganda. I know that some people have
tried to suggest carryover from one concept to another, but I see a real
differentiation between these various techniques, and that’s what I’m inter-
ested in. What I understand about fûkeiron is that what gets positioned is a
landscape that is filled with signs of state power and violence. I saw that in
A.K.A. Serial Killer. As a result of this, the landscape becomes essentially
the subject of the film; it determines who we are. We are all effects, so that
the landscape is in the foreground.
But when you get to The Red Army/PFLP, I think everything is
shifted. You’ve returned to the centrality of human agency as the subject.
And therefore the effect is that there is now a distance between the cam-
era and what it is narrating or portraying. Whereas with A.K.A. you get
the effect of identification, as if we are all a part of this landscape. But we
are not part of it, because the landscape in The Red Army/PFLP is really
human.
MA: I’m very happy to hear that viewpoint. In fact, hearing you talk right
now, you have made clear exactly the point upon which I was so conflicted
at that time. The reason that I wanted to foreground the landscape origi-
nally is that power manifests itself there. Power does sometimes appear
in a human figure, but in general, power is the system itself. For example,
people say that power is located in the state as a mechanism of violence
along with the military or police apparatus that guarantees that power,
but this is only a small portion of power, a piece of the system. The point
of landscape theory was to say that landscape itself is a reflection of the
omnipresence of power.
I tried to shoot from this same perspective in Palestine but was
finally unable to complete the project. The reason, as I said earlier, was
that the struggle for Palestinian liberation had already been established as
a movement for national liberation, and, in fact, armed struggle had been
waged for many years. In this situation, only the results of that struggle,
the traces of its past, could tell the story; the reality itself could never be
captured. After all my anguished reflection, regardless of enemy power, I
began to think that landscape was decided in the relations among guerilla
fighters. Therefore, one of the conclusions I reached was that it was nec-
essary to look at the situation of the structure of power of the guerrillas
in their struggle against the structure of the enemy power, that structure
which could be found in the landscape. In order to speak about this dual
structure, I proposed newsreel film as a semantic ordering. Therefore, in
The Red Army/PFLP, I prepared three different types of scenes to capture
this situation. The first phase would be scenes of guerilla fighters; the sec-
ond would be scenes of radical armed revolutionary movements in Japan;
and the third would be of the televised scenes of the battles at Sanrizuka
shot by Shinsuke Ogawa and the others.
It was my position, through presenting the variations shown by these
three different types of scenes, to propose the landscape as a space that
could illuminate the contrasts between these three separate layers. An
explanation of my real position is the following: the easiest thing would have
been to show A.K.A. Serial Killer together with the Palestinian images only,
but I could not; I thought that, as a Japanese person, I should show the
second and third dimensions. I was criticizing the Japanese radical move-
ment and, to a lesser extent, the farmer’s movement at Sanrizuka as well.
My basic position is close to the Palestinian side, and at the same time, I
cannot stop criticizing the Japanese side. So I needed to find out what’s
going on at the time and what’s going on, on the Japanese side. I tried to
find some balance with these critiques, and I tried to say it was merely news
and not [an expression of] landscape. What we need to do is to stand more
radically.
HH: Is that the meaning of propaganda for you, then?
MA: I believe so. The Red Army/PFLP was made as a declaration and not
as a documentary. The screening itself was my cinema movement. By con-
ducting screenings throughout Japan, I met so many people and activists,
and I talked with them. They said they wanted to see some text on how to
fight or how to kill the enemy. They expected my newsreel to show such
tactics and techniques. But I am saying, “No, at first, we should know who
we are.” So there was much quarreling after the screening. The argument
itself is my aim and allows me to say this is a newsreel, not a landscape.

I think my situation and our Japanese situation at that time should have
shown more clearly the differences between landscape and newsreel. After
seeing it, people were disappointed, because my newsreel is not a textbook
for killing the enemy, or not supportive of the Red Army Faction. I argued
that we should look back seriously at our understanding about the situation
and political line. And that is why the Red Army Faction started to refuse
my film.
The more important thing is, how can I continue my cinema? Even
after the theory of landscape and newsreel, my position as cinema director
never changed, because I myself have only one existence. So I collabo-
rated with the Japanese Red Army—not with the Red Army Faction.10 After
all, whether I collaborate with the JRA or not, I will use cinema to explain
myself more and more, but it will be criticized by Mr. Harootunian, as he has
done with Mr. Said.
HH: No, I’m not criticizing you. I was asking—I’m interested in your own
artistic movement from one particular problematic to another, because I
happen to think that the way you dealt with landscape in A.K.A. Serial Killer
is close to the way we live our lives. The work on Palestine is interesting
as something about struggling against colonial power, a struggle that still
continues, but in many ways it is one that seems doomed. You’ve already
shown the reasons why, in A.K.A. Serial Killer, it is bound to end badly. I
didn’t mean to criticize you at all, because in many ways, especially now,
our situation . . . is comparable.
MA: That’s right. I agree with you. We need to start again from that point.
We should go back to A.K.A. Serial Killer and restart.
10. For one reading of the factions of the Red Army, see Patricia Steinhoff’s “Hijack-
ers, Bombers, and Bank Robbers: Managerial Style in the Japanese Red Army,” Journal
of Asian Studies 48, no. 4 (November 1989): 724–40. Steinhoff’s analysis of the links
between the organizational attributes of radical groups and corporate management is
provocative and open to argument, but the essay supplies a detailed and focused history
of the various splits within the Red Army, culled from the literature of the groups and
interviews with the members.
However, it is important to add that the Red Army Faction was a faction of the Com-
munist League (aka Bund), which began as a student-centered movement and came to
advocate an armed revolt as the form of radicalization. Meanwhile, the Japanese Red
Army consisted of those individual activists who voluntarily went abroad to support the
Palestinian struggle. Although the members of those groups had certain personal rela-
tions, they should be considered as separate movements.
HH: I agree with you. It is an important starting point, or a second start-

ing point, in understanding how we perceive. We aren’t going to perceive
by being guerilla fighters. We know what that does. And especially in the
United States, that has acquired really dangerous associations in public
opinion.
The thing that caught my attention is that you were really trying to
provide a criticism. Even though you were misread, and people had expec-
tations for you to be a propagandist of some sort—I’m trying to separate
newsreel from propaganda now, but the problem with the newsreel that you
present is that in ordinary terms, a newsreel isn’t supposed to be critical,
is it?
MA: This is the tragedy of newsreel. I tried to say that the audience should
be the creator of newsreels. So I showed three dimensions in The Red
Army/PFLP, but I came under harsh criticism from political power, the party,
and the audience, because at that time in Japan things were very dark after
the affair of the United Red Army tragedy.11 Everyone left the movement of
students and workers, but at the same time, some of them could not stop—
they needed to continue. But now I am saying there is no need to use arms.
Please examine your position, and then, through that, create a new way.
This is my ultimate message in The Red Army/PFLP.
11. The tragedy referred to here is the Asama Lodge incident (Asama Sanso Jiken), which
took place in February 1972. Five radical activists of the Red Army Faction and the Keihin
Area Struggle Committee, calling themselves the United Red Army, following a brutal
internal purge that left many dead, seized a lodge in the mountains of Nagano prefec-
ture and took the lodge owner’s wife as hostage. A siege operation was put in place by
the government, with self-defense forces assigned to bring down the radicals. Much of
the proceedings was aired on TV and became an enormous media event. Shoot-outs
erupted, and people on both sides were killed. In the initial stages, many supported the
radicals. After the incident, it was well publicized that, in fact, the activists had already
started killing one another within the compound. Although this information was known
early on, the purpose of the timing was to discredit the Left as a whole and was extremely
successful, so much so that many now claim that this was the end of radical movements
in Japan. It would be senseless to deny the brutality and idiocy of the violence on the part
of those radicals, but some reflection is required in light of the overwhelming discourses
that have congealed around the event as a sign of the end of radicalism in Japan. Many
radical movements continued right through the incident (including Sanrizuka, the Mina-
mata antipollution group, day-workers unionizing movement, etc.) up to the present day.
It should also be noted, against the standard reading of the inevitability of internalized
violence, that the extremism on display is completely inseparable from the greater pres-
sures exerted by the reigning powers.
HH: In A.K.A., the making of the film and how the film really attempts to
negotiate a point of divergence, a wonderful observation on your part—it’s
a point of criticism, and one that grows out of a particular political situation,
the sixties, Anpo, and so forth. But in The Red Army/PFLP, that critical
moment gets obscured. The reason prompting my interest is because right
before I came here I saw a film by Marco Bellocchio called Good Morning,
Night [Buongiorno, Notte, 2003], and it was about the Red Brigades in Italy
and the kidnapping of Aldo Moro. I think it was basically a reactionary film.
In the end, you get the sense that Bellocchio was saying none of this was
worth anything, but in so saying, he soft-pedals the role of the state.
MA: Yes. Ultimately, Moro was killed by the state. This should be the
beginning.
HH: In The Red Army/PFLP, the critical moment was obscured, maybe
because it was presented or seen as a newsreel. But it was a much more
complex situation because there were people who thought that Mr. Adachi
was going to do something else.
MA: That was the biggest shortcoming. Criticism, the critique of a cer-
tain target, should have been made clearly. One of the problems was that
although we went to the trouble of using a lot of Japanese subtitles to imbue
the work with a critical spirit, their usage wound up making the criticism
vaguer. Another problem was the use, as a keyword, of the quote of the
writer Ghassan Kanafani, “The best form of propaganda is armed struggle.”
This caused more problems.
Of course, my position at the time was that it was important to fight
back against the enemy through armed struggle, but at the same time, use
armed struggle to mobilize the Palestinians themselves and wage an inter-
national political campaign. That kind of struggle was right for the Palestini-
ans. At the same time, however, that approach has no applicability when
we think about the case of Japan. The Red Army Faction in Japan then saw
me more as a propagandist than as a film director. That’s why they were
so frustrated with The Red Army/PFLP. It begins with a hijacking scene,
but beyond that the content was merely critical, they said. They criticized
me: “Why don’t you make more propaganda films?” “Why don’t you put out
something that negates the present conditions?” Propaganda is something
that destroys the present conditions. “If you’re going to make propaganda
for the people, then do it,” they said.
This is the most important point. While critically making these two
points about propaganda, they don’t emerge clearly. Although I was making
a “news film,” I was after all, being slightly evasive, and that emerged.
Therefore, whatever method I follow, I needed to make clear the people’s
struggle. With this in mind, I went to Palestine to make the next work and
start over.
HH: In fact, you were making a lot of films there.
MA: Yes, shooting film and video footage. But I couldn’t produce any docu-
mentary cinema or narrative cinema. So I will continue now.
HH: As you said earlier, all the footage was destroyed in the war, right?
That’s amazing.
MA: They were missing or lost in the war. In guerilla life, the first thing is
a weapon. So the question becomes how to defend or position the anti-
aircraft weapons in the Palestinian bases. But, as a result of air attacks, I
ended up empty-handed.
I think up until now, it was still possible to continue through this, even
though I was empty-handed. At the same time, some Palestinians said OK,
we will find something for us to do. They promised, but nothing came of it
yet.
HH: Doing the work that you did, was there any follow-up by the Palestini-
ans themselves, for them to shoot their own struggles?
MA: The point was that the films were not supposed to be made by me, so I
had to figure out how to mobilize them. They did not follow my suggestions
only; they started so many films. But for me, these were just one-sided
films, which they had already been making, based on the original novels.
So I tried to say to my friends who were fighters, “You yourself should make
films.” Some of them started, but unfortunately, some of them were killed
during fighting.
HH: That’s a really interesting observation, and, again, I find your notion of
collaboration really important. What you are saying to these Palestinians is
that they have to write their history.
In the Japanese context, many people compared you with Godard:
both Masao Adachi and Jean-Luc Godard engaged in Palestinian struggles.
For Godard, this was the time of the Dziga Vertov Group,12 and then he
12. This is the revolutionary film production group formed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-
Pierre Gorin in the wake of revolution in Paris in May 1968. Their radical mixture of praxis
returned to France maybe because of problems involved in producing the

films, while you, Mr. Adachi, remained there doing screenings.
MA: The PLO refused Godard’s policy, and this ended his attempt to make
a film [later called Here and There] with them. So after 1972, after the Pal-
estinian attack at the Munich Olympics, he could state his standpoint more
clearly. Then he prepared to make Here and There. He built up his own text,
but it was not sponsored by the PLO.
In my case, from the beginning, I spoke with the PLO and PLF about
whether my idea was right. Then, as the person responsible for the infor-
mation bureau in the PFLP, Ghassan was very understanding. So I could
continue my production of The Red Army/PFLP. But, in time, the contents
changed more and more, only as I rethought the project. Godard’s work
also changed from Victory for the Revolution to Here and There. With this
new idea he could say more clearly what he wanted about the Palestinian
struggle and express his own standpoint on it. In my case, there was no
change in cooperating with the Palestinian side, and I continued to make
newsreels. This is a relation between Godard and me—what is the differ-
ence? From the beginning, my position has been not to collaborate with
any policy, neither with the PLO nor PFLP nor the Japanese Red Army
Faction. So if you can compare Here and There with The Red Army/PFLP,
I believe the difference is not so significant, but he needed the time to make
Here and There, which wasn’t completed until 1974.
HH: But still I think there is a significant difference, insofar as Godard

assumed a European audience, while you tried to work toward a Pales-
tinian audience.
MA: Yes, I never differentiated between audiences, but I particularly wished

to show the Palestinian side.
HH: I think there is another difference, and it was brought out in something
you said earlier. While both of you have been experimental workers or film-
makers, Godard was always, because of the New Wave and the emphasis
on auteurism, deeply embedded in capital. In the end, when you say that he
made his film for European audiences, this suggests that it had something
to do with market, something to do with audience, an audience removed
and theory had a significant influence on film movements in Japan. Representative works
include Pravda (1970), Le Vent d’est (1970), Lotte in Italia (1971), and Vladimir et Rosa
(1970).
from the scene. Your whole work was about involving the Palestinians in
the making of films.
MA: Yes, Godard lost his direct interest in Palestinian problems. He didn’t
lose the very nice counterpart represented by Edward Said. Why they didn’t
cooperate, I don’t know.
HH: That’s a good question. The real difference, therefore, is expressed

in your notion of the cinema movement, and the promise of illuminating
insights from that cinema movement is the promise to return film back to
a world audience. It’s almost a way to make films and make sure they are
shown outside of some kind of market system. There is something uto-
pian in this. Though the films have much in common, it separates you from
Godard from the very beginning.
MA: He did try to break through the system through the Dziga Vertov Group,
but he was completely defeated, I believe. Oshima said to me before going
to the Palestinian front, “Don’t go to Palestine. If you go as a cineaste, you’ll
be destroyed by the cinema capitalist syndicate.” But so far, I’m very happy,
because I’m staying in the Far East and receive little discrimination by the
cinema syndicate compared to what people go through in Europe or the
United States [laughter]. This is a great opportunity for me.
HH: By the way, we have heard that even while in Palestine in the 1970s
you were in contact with Japanese radical cultural producers, such as the
artist Genpei Akasegawa and the theater director Juro Kara, who, in fact,
brought his own theater troupe there. This calls attention to a connection
between you and your work and radical artists in Japan, who were willing
to supply support to the Palestinian cause. Would you elaborate on this
connection and the nature of your collaboration?
MA: The time when I started making films, around the end of 1959 and the
beginning of 1960, was during a transitional time, when conceptual art was
on the rise and transforming into anticonceptual art and then shifting again
into myriad directions. Around that time, I myself was involved in trying to
start up VAN Eiga Kagaku Kenkyûjo [VAN Film Science Research Center],
as I moved from creating student films to living in a group with a communal
lifestyle. VAN became a kind of salon, a space of exchange in which film-
related people and all sorts of artists from different fields met and engaged
in debates, where information flowed about exhibits and events in each
field. And so whenever anyone was doing anything, anywhere, we would go
out as a group, expanding the sphere of exchange so that it transcended

such separate realms as film or painting or literature.
I met Genpei Akasegawa at an exchange with some people from
the Neo-Dada Organizers and found his works very appealing. I later over-
saw his “happenings” with the group Hi-Red Center. His prominence had
advanced, from the exhibition of the Thousand Yen Note to the issuing of
the Cherry Blossom Republic Currency ; he had proposed a plan whereby if
one bought enough cherry blossom currency with Japanese yen, the former
would automatically overtake the latter. In fact, many people across the
country bought his Cherry Blossom Republic Currency, and in his room,
increasing amounts of Japanese yen piled up as wastepaper, stuffed into
cardboard boxes. Around that time, when I had him design the poster for
The Red Army/PFLP, the PFLP, as coproducers of the film, had praised
the power of the poster. They invited him to accompany me to Lebanon for
a year and be in charge of designing their posters and other propaganda
materials. But unfortunately, Akasegawa was held up in Japan, having to
deal with various problems, including the prosecution by the Japanese gov-
ernment in the charge of counterfeiting the Thousand Yen Note, and could
not get out there.
As for Juro Kara, he had founded his theater group, Jokyo Gekijo
[The Situation Theater], based in the Shinjuku area of Tokyo. With the new
style of temporarily building a tent in the unused public space, he shoved off
vigorously into the modernist-centered conventional theater world [the so-
called Shingeki (New Drama)] of the time. Since his practice was contem-
poraneous with the underground film movement, an exchange began. The
“theory of privileging the body” [Tokkenteki Nikutai-ron] that he so freshly
proclaimed at the time was a new theory of making theater/performance.
With it, he claimed that certain uses of the performer’s body itself could
generate human power that causes social change. I felt tremendous sym-
pathy with the way he was seeking to develop theater as social movement
and the theoretical magnetic field he was creating therein. Later on, his
theater troupe expanded its tour route not only throughout Japan but to
overseas cities in such countries as South Korea and Brazil. At one point,
before I left Japan, I saw his production of Kara ban: Kaze no matasaburô
[Matasaburo of the Wind: Kara version], which was a performance based
on a piece by the poet Kenji Miyazawa. We came to talk about how tan-
teisha, a private detective agency, which had been one of the thematic
pillars of theatrical development, was exactly like the Mossad, and the con-
versation developed to the extent of bringing it to Palestine to do a special
version Paresuchina ban: Kaze no matasaburô [Matasaburo of the Wind:

Palestine Version]. What was amazing about Kara is that once he thought
up a project, he threw his whole self into it, doing his best to quickly put the
plan into action and present it. His objective domain was not limited to the
events on the stage, but included the entire event of the tour for the creation
of theatrical situations. The seriousness of commitment was shared by all
the troupe members. When he did itinerant performances centered in the
refugee camps of Lebanon and Syria, the performers who played the Mos-
sad characters continued to be pelted with rocks by the kids who came to
see the play, even after it was over; they were troubled with wounds [laugh-
ter]. During the tour, I used to engage in talks with Kara over the pathos
of revolution that should be expanded, as in “the border crossing of those
who create” and “the sublimation of the soul in the struggle for liberation.”
Speaking of both Akasegawa and Kara, even now—thirty-five years later,
as the years pile up—they continue to be at the forefront of creative activi-
ties. This is more encouraging to me than words could ever express.
HH: Finally, I wonder if you could say more about your conception of
cinema movement in terms of your more recent work or your future work.
The reason I’m mentioning this is because there are all kinds of people talk-
ing about forms of consumption and consumerism as forms of resistance,
which I think is absolute nonsense, an alibi for the absence of action.
MA: Yes, in Japan there are so many talented directors, and half of them
think they should make program pictures or else they cannot create some-
thing new. In my case, I don’t mind using video or digital, and if there are
only two or three in the audience, that is enough for me. So there is no need
to make a program picture. But if you need a bigger audience, you need
to have access to your own cinema theater, which is a part of the system.
Again, I will go back to the sixties and I will start a bus tour to screen my
new film work.
HH: Regarding your declaration to go back to the sixties to start over, I have
two questions. Your audiences now are different, and you’re dealing with a
whole new generation, and I wonder what you plan to do about that.
MA: Now, I believe, the younger generation can understand my works better
than audiences could during the sixties. And, at the same time, there is
more and more flexibility among this generation about the different modes
of expression in cinema, as in the works I have created. So I have a big
opportunity to talk with them. Cinema should continue to do things this
way. I am making one film now, and it is my plan to try to make four more
picture screenings in theaters in my life. But I now have a free hand, and
I’m planning to make anything I wish, to continue making films in this way
or another at different levels. So I am trying to collaborate with the younger
generation but without using some big-frame cinema.
HH: When you say that today’s generation probably understands A.K.A.
Serial Killer more perceptively than the older generation, I think you’re right.
The movie is kind of prophetic when we look at it now, both in its depiction
of the city and the nature of the violence itself.
MA: For example, I’m so happy to see someone like Go Hirasawa as a

young cinema scholar, who is showing various points of view through
cinema archives. Through showing his opinion as a cinema scholar, he
can open up a wider view to so many young people. Anyway, he is show-
ing many radical and underground works at theater archives, enabling the
younger generation to see older films and to collaborate with filmmakers
by giving that point of view. It should be a critics’ movement. Before, there
was a critics’ movement, but now he is starting this role anew. So I myself
should respond to his position through new possibilities and new cinema.
The more technology develops, such as the digital camera, the easier it is
to get the opportunity to see and create works, promote screenings, and
meet the people. So why can’t we use this opportunity more and more?
HH: The second question relates to the way you keep going back to the
sixties. I wonder if you could talk about your own autobiography, and what
was going on in your own life?
MA: I think of my own experience as a valuable resource. By making that

the starting point, and through mutual inquiry over differences and simi-
larities on various points, the bodily ideals we have of our own reality, that
is, the mutual questioning of the perception of the times, I believe we can
carry on a conversation with young people through various means and at
different levels.
HH: I would like to know, though, from a more personal standpoint, what
was going on.
MA: As I said at the beginning, the 1960s was a time when art and politics
were felt simultaneously, with no separation into different categories. One
could say that even as I exist as an individual, my existence is one in which
I make a commitment to the age itself. Therefore, from here on, as well, I
want to live as one who raises questions for the people of this generation.
HH: But what was it about that moment that made you feel hopeful? What
aspirations did you have for Japanese society?
MA: Within that period, the consciousness raised by living with your own
agonizing problems was such that it could be possible to transform society
or the world through your own struggles and, in that sense, see yourself
and society as a single organism. Rather, that was the only way you could
see things. It was in no way overly optimistic but rather the common sense
shared by so many young people living so vigorously. I don’t believe that
this was simply a matter of the environment or atmosphere of the times.
Isn’t it the case that no one expects the current generation to see this age
in a similar way, to experience a similar way of being or way of life? I wish
they would simply take a look at themselves in this regard. For that reason,
the contemporary environment is much more difficult than it was in the
past; the effort to grasp this society or world through your own body, in any
way that works, must be mobilized more and more.
Therefore, we are losing the need for such things as educational
films or documentaries. Instead, we must start making films from some
place that is not yet established, perhaps. Therefore, if I am asked where
an intervention should be made, I think the answer is that it must be made
at the level of the personal.
HH: You mentioned a “personal” approach, but I think you also have a
populist aspect. You believe that art can be made by anyone and everyone,
don’t you?
MA: Because I believe that, I start at the level of the individual.
HH: That makes perfect sense. What you are saying is that art has to be
made with everybody. People have to be involved with the making of art just
as they have to be involved with the making of their own politics. We live in
societies where we merely talk about democratic politics, but that kind of
politics hasn’t existed for a long time. These are just names.
MA: Michael Moore or Spielberg—I respect them, but they have created
nothing that is necessary, have they?
HH: Thanks very much for your time and candor.

<Abstract for Harootunian/Kohso / Messages in a Bottle: An Interview with
Filmmaker Masao Adachi >
In the summer of 2006, Sabu Kohso, an independent writer, translator, and activist, and
Harry Harootunian, a historian at New York University, interviewed the prominent
filmmaker and political activist Masao Adachi. The occasion for the interview was the
completion of his first film in Japan after years of imprisonment in Lebanon and Japan.
Adachi’s career and activities spanned the crucial decades of the 1950s and 1960s,
perhaps the most intense period of radical protest in Japan’s postwar period. His
experimental work constituted a significant intervention in these years of revolutionary
promise and failure. After the failed revolution in Japan, he spent almost a quarter of a
century in exile in Lebanon and Palestine, often working for Palestinian organizations.

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Messages in a Bottle:

An Interview with Filmmaker Masao Adachi

Introduction to the Interview

Harry Harootunian and Sabu Kohso

In June 2006, we interviewed the Japanese experimental filmmaker

boundary 2 35:3 (2008) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-012 © 2008 by Duke University Press

Translated by Philip Kaffen

Masao Adachi appeared in the new film movements happening in

went enormous transformations, with new theories and practices permeat-

Cinema/Revolution: An Interview with

Transcribed and translated by Philip Kaffen

As you know, we showed two films—A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969) and

MA: This is really an enormous question, so the answer may come in a

MA: That’s right. In the films I completed in my earliest student years, I

MA: That is definitely one characteristic. Theoretically, I moved toward the

HH: Some of us called attention to a similarity between French Situationists

MA: The making of A.K.A. Serial Killer progressed as we tried to develop

would be damaging to fûkeiron. We created the film by focusing on the con-

HH: So, in other words, becoming a guerilla is also sustaining the

HH: Why so?

MA: I have been influenced by people like Brecht and Beckett.

MA: A more complicated explanation is possible, and at the same time,

MA: Methodologically speaking, I was an experimental filmmaker, experi-

MA: Like you [laughter]?

or setting out to earn a living by relying on connections of acquaintances

of estrangement amongst public opinion. The eruption of this mistrust led

HH: In this connection, readers would also be interested in learning about

Palestinian organization, I ultimately started to live in military camps as a

fighters, not necessarily Marxists who weren’t Palestinians, like George

MA: Yes, he criticizes “Orientalism,” imperialism, and conservative national-

MA: After I went over [completely] to the Palestinian side, as an interna-

HH: Is that the meaning of propaganda for you, then?

itself is my aim and allows me to say this is a newsreel, not a landscape.

HH: I agree with you. It is an important starting point, or a second start-

HH: In fact, you were making a lot of films there.

returned to France maybe because of problems involved in producing the

HH: But still I think there is a significant difference, insofar as Godard

MA: Yes, I never differentiated between audiences, but I particularly wished

HH: That’s a good question. The real difference, therefore, is expressed

out as a group, expanding the sphere of exchange so that it transcended

version Paresuchina ban: Kaze no matasaburô [Matasaburo of the Wind:

MA: For example, I’m so happy to see someone like Go Hirasawa as a

MA: I think of my own experience as a valuable resource. By making that

MA: Because I believe that, I start at the level of the individual.

HH: Thanks very much for your time and candor.

Filmmaker Masao Adachi >

Harry Harootunian, a historian at New York University, interviewed the prominent

experimental work constituted a significant intervention in these years of revolutionary

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